Hair transplantation procedures are well-known, and typically involve harvesting donor hair grafts from the “donor areas,” for example, side and back fringe areas of the patient's scalp, and implanting them in a bald area (“recipient area”). Historically, the harvested hair grafts were relatively large (3-5 mm), although more recently the donor grafts may be single follicular units, which are naturally occurring aggregates of 1-3 (and much less commonly, 4-5) closely spaced hair follicles (“the FUs”) that are distributed over the surface of thebody. In one well-known process, a linear portion of the scalp is removed from a donor area by dissection, using a scalpel to cut down into the fatty subcutaneous tissue. The strip is then dissected (under a microscope) into the component follicular units, which are then implanted into a recipient area in respective puncture incisions made by a needle or razor blade. Forceps are typically used to grasp and place the follicular unit grafts into the needle puncture locations, although other instruments and methods are known for doing so.
For instance, U.S. Pat. No. 7,172,604 (Cole) discloses an instrument for the extraction of individual follicular units. U.S. Patent Publication 20050267506 (Harris) discloses a method and apparatus for the extraction of follicular units by first scoring the outer skin layers with a sharp punch, and then inserting a blunt punch into the incision to separate the hair follicular unit from the surrounding tissue and fatty layer to reduce the incidence of hair transection. Another U.S. Pat. No. 6,585,746 (Gildenberg) discloses a hair transplantation system utilizing a robotic system, including a robotic arm and a hair follicle end effector associated with the robotic arm that could be used to harvest hair follicles from the donor area.
Despite certain advances in improving the tools for harvesting of follicular units, there remains a need for a more efficient harvesting tool that increases the yield of usable harvested specimens, improves retention of the harvested units in the removal tool and the quality of the obtained specimens.